If there's one thing the T25U25 has shown me, it's that our commenter base loves two things:
- Making arbitrary predictions about the future
- Arguing about these arbitrary predictions
With that in mind, we're introducing a new series here at PPP that will run until the start of the regular season (October 7th) called Wisdom of Crowds. In this series, I'll be posting a set of 3-5 players around the league on a regular basis, and you guys will be responsible for predicting their goals, assists, and point totals for the upcoming regular season (assuming they play all 82 games, and aren't traded).
I'll then post the average prediction (with margin of error), the best case, and the worst case scenario for each player predicted. At the end of the year, we'll take a look back at the predictions to see how close we are to reality. The most accurate commenter for each player will be compensated handsomely (with pride).
This is an idea I stole from Football Outsiders, a stats-driven football website. In theory, our crowdsourced predictions should be pretty accurate, and it will be interesting to see that be put to the test. There's a couple quick ground rules I want to outline before giving you our first set of players to guess.
Don't be an idiot. I'll be removing obviously ridiculous predictions.- As mentioned above, assume the player plays all 82 games for the team they're currently on.
- I'm not going to cover every player in the league. There will tend to be a theme with each set of players, but obviously, some people are going to be omitted.
Feel free to discuss your predictions and reasoning in the comment section of each article.
With all that out of the way, lets get to the first group of players. We'll start with 5 established superstar centers.
Sidney Crosby - Pittsburgh Penguins
Anze Kopitar - Los Angeles Kings
John Tavares - New York Islanders
Patrice Bergeron - Boston Bruins
Ryan Getzlaf - Anaheim Ducks